Vice President Kamala Harris, a trailblazer as the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrant parents, has become the first Black woman of Caribbean and South Asian descent to be nominated for president by a major political party. With the Democratic National Convention of 2024 now behind her, the critical task before Harris is clear: Can she garner enough support to defeat Donald Trump on November 5?
Immigration once again looms large in this presidential race, with the issue continuing to serve as a flashpoint in American politics. For decades, immigrants have been the scapegoat of politicians in elections. As a child of immigrants, Harris is uniquely positioned to tackle this debate, yet her role as a leader on immigration policy has not been inspiring.
Where does Harris, who was once given the tough assignment by President Biden in March 2021 to lead the administration’s diplomatic efforts to reduce problems at the border, stand now as a presidential hopeful?
Since launching her presidential campaign, Harris has cast herself as a former prosecutor who took on undocumented gang members; a former border state attorney general in California who prosecuted human traffickers; and a would-be president eager to sign into the law the toughest border restrictions in a generation.
Harris recently told a roaring crowd at a campaign event in Glendale, Ariz., that she’d put her record against Republican nominee and former president Donald Trump’s “every day of the week.”
“Donald Trump does not want to fix this problem,” she said. “He talks a big game about border security, but he does not walk the walk.”
Harris has also said that she would continue the Biden administration’s hard-line approach to the border if she wins the presidency. She supported the bipartisan border security bill Biden backed this year, which included measures that would have effectively shut down the border if illegal crossings surpassed 5,000 a day. She has pledged to sign the bill as president.
Harris’s campaign leaned into the border messaging with a recent television ad that highlighted her support for the “toughest border control bill in decades” and her history of prosecuting drug smugglers.
“As president, she will hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking,” the narrator said in the ad. “Fixing the border is tough. So is Kamala Harris.”
Harris has also said she backs comprehensive immigration reform with “an earned pathway to citizenship,” but she has not spelled out the details.
What did she actually do as vice president on immigration and the border?
“I’ve asked her, the VP, today, because she’s the most qualified person to do it, to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that…are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border,” President Biden said during a White House meeting about immigration on March 24, 2021.
From the start of that assignment, media coverage and the White House’s communication about the role were muddled. Headlines described Harris as the “point person on immigration” and “placed in charge of migration crisis,” while senior officials later said Harris would “oversee a whole-of-government approach” to dealing with migration.
The White House’s communications team spent much of that early time trying to clarify the assignment, but as migrant border crossings continued to rise, much of the press and the public’s attention became focused on why Harris and the administration were not more focused on addressing short-term problems.
Harris’s own missteps added to the mess. She was widely criticized in the press for being defensive during her first international trips to Mexico and Guatemala in June 2021, and by immigrant rights activists for a speech in which she urged “folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border: Do not come. Do not come.”
She also evaded questions about why neither she nor Biden had been to the southern border when she was talking about the border abroad, leading to criticism by Republicans.
Then came a widely derided interview with Lester Holt of NBC News during that trip, in which she appeared to mock Holt’s question about why she hadn’t visited the southern border if she was working to try to stem the flow of migration north.
“At some point, you know, we are going to the border,” Harris told Holt. “We’ve been to the border, so this whole thing about the border — we’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border.”
When Holt pointed out that she hadn’t, she seemed to discount the question, replying that she hadn’t “been to Europe … I don’t … understand the point that you’re making. I’m not discounting the importance of the border.”
Harris has said she worked with three Central American countries to improve living conditions and lower odds that migrants would leave El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras for reasons, including poverty, gang violence and corruption. She focused mainly on private and public investment in Central America. Her efforts included dispatching coronavirus vaccines there, creating anti-smuggling task forces, and investing $4 billion in U.S. aid to the region. However, she faced challenges because Central America was driven by gangs and corrupt leaders after years of failed U.S. intervention. Aides say Harris’s most powerful influence was in the private sector, helping to create jobs so people would stay home.
In May 2021, she issued a “call to action” to tackle the root causes of migration from northern Central America. She met with a dozen CEOs at the White House to encourage investment in the region to create jobs and improve supply chains by moving overseas operations closer to the United States. They began with $750 million in investments, loans, housing, and other resources.
Since then, more than 50 companies have gotten involved, and total investment has surpassed $5.2 billion and created more than 70,000 jobs in the region, according to Jonathan Fantini-Porter, CEO of the Partnership for Central America, the nonprofit that oversees implementation of the effort.
Columbia Sportswear, Nespresso, auto-parts manufacturer Yazaki North America Inc., and others have created thousands of manufacturing and farming jobs in the region.
Migration from the three Central American countries during the Biden administration has fallen 35%, from about 683,890 to 447,270 in 2023 — lower than it was in 2019 under Trump. But analysts say it is difficult to tie the reduction in numbers to Harris’s efforts, and there have been increases in migration from other countries.
Perhaps the most glaring example of the challenges the Biden administration has faced occurred in December 2023, when nearly 250,000 migrants were apprehended, an all-time high. The numbers went down dramatically this year, however, largely due to increased enforcement in Mexico, where military patrols and highway checkpoints are intercepting would-be crossers at the U.S. government’s request.
Another challenge for Harris is that northern Central Americans are no longer the biggest group arriving at the border. They accounted for 71% of all border crossers in 2019, but so far this year are 23%, since the number of people from China, Venezuela, and other nontraditional nations has increased.
Her role in shaping immigration policy has come with both successes and setbacks. While some of her initiatives have contributed to a reduction in migration from Central America, others highlight the complex and evolving nature of the border crisis. Nonetheless, she remains part of an administration that has implemented measures aimed at addressing these challenges.
Whether Harris can now leverage that work and her new plan on immigration to win over voters concerned about this issue remains to be seen. What is certain is that she will continue to be hammered on it by the right as the issue remains front and center in this election.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Felicia J. Persaud is the publisher of NewsAmericasNow.com, a daily news outlet focused on positive news on the Black immigrant communities of the Caribbean and Latin America.